


Orange Blossoms

by acidtonguejenny



Series: The Language of Flowers [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Established Relationship, Family Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:46:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14363331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/acidtonguejenny
Summary: "It's a big house." Chamomile reasoned.--Four years later. Lark POV.





	Orange Blossoms

**Author's Note:**

> Sudden kidfic appears? :''D

Four times Lark reached for something that was not there, and only on the fourth occasion did he realize something was amiss.

His pencil was on the ground, rather than in its usual place by his left hand. His level was on the worktable across the room, while his eraser was gone entirely. 

When he couldn’t find his pad of draft paper, he pushed his chair away from the desk and looked out the workshop’s open door to the yard. The blanket in the grass was more or less as he’d left it, a gnawed carrot and a stack of blocks strewn across it. 

His missing pad was there. His daughter was not. 

Lark went to the door and peered into the depths of Chamomile’s perpetually overgrown garden, which had been known to swallow small people that wandered into it. Nothing appeared to be rustling within, but he knew from experience that this didn’t necessarily mean anything.  

“Iris?” Standing in the door and searching the hilltop with his eyes, he called, “Come out, daisy.” 

A giggle came from behind him, somewhere in the shop. He turned, handily blocking her exit.

“You’d better not be in the sawdust again,” he said, issuing the warning to the general space as he looked about.

“I’m not!” Came the muffled answer. “It’s too itchy.”

Several wood curls rolled from under the centermost worktable. Lark squatted to look beneath.

Iris grinned up at him, caught and entirely remorseless. Her curly hair was, impossibly, even more tangled that it had been that morning when Lark had given up on taming it, and she had most definitely been in the garden. Her dress was smeared with soil, and also getting too short for her, his little weed.

“Did you take your father’s pencils?” He asked her.

“Maybe,” she sang, as she scrubbed at a doodle of a bunny on the floorboards with his eraser. It was new, however, the various flowers, humanoid figures, and sunshines around it were not. 

“I need one back.” He told her reasonably. “You can keep the rest. For now.” He added, because every discussion with his daughter was a negotiation, and her memory was superb. 

She’d been sitting on them evidently, because she reached between her legs and brought out four pencils, one of which he hadn’t seen in at least a month. She offered the handful.

“May I have this one?” He pointed to the blue one.

“No. I like that one.” She said, and extended another. “Take this one.”

“Thank you, dear.” He said gravely, taking the gift. “I will need the eraser in a moment.”

She nodded, humming as she went back to her drawing. 

He returned to his work, keeping an ear out for small footsteps. He went uninterrupted for a while longer, until squeals from the garden startled him.

“Iris?” He said, lurching up.

“Papa?” Said his daughter, still beneath the table. 

Lark bent to put eyes on her and frowned as she blinked curiously back at him. “But if you’re there...”

He looked out again and saw the bottom half of the kitchen door was tellingly open. 

“Daisy, did your mother return?” He asked.

“I dunno.” She said, at the same time another plaintive cry came from the garden. 

“Mama! Papa!”

Lark rushed, and came up short at the dense edge of the tomato plants. “Aster! Where are you?”

“Hot!” Aster wailed, which meant he’d trampled into the pepper patch again.

Lark became aware of Iris clinging to his pants, and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Aster!” She said fiercely. “You know peppers are bad!”

“Shush, daisy, don’t scare him more. Stay there.” Lark said, one leg in between tomato plants as he planned his route to the peppers in the back corner. 

“Papa, one popped!” 

“Don’t put your fingers in your mouth!” Iris cautioned, with questionable relish.

“What on earth is all this noise?” Came Chamomile’s voice from the direction of the house.

Lark, who was not taller than the tomato plants, raised an arm over the greenery and waved to communicate his position.

“Aster’s stuck in the peppers again.” Iris informed him.

“Oh dear,” said Chamomile. “Iris, I wish you wouldn’t smile so.”

It was then that Lark spied his son across the melon patch, legs caught in a vine and sitting between pepper plants. Bright red fruits hung on either side of his head, gleaming little beacons of death as far as poor Aster was concerned. Aster, who had crushed half a dozen in his hands the summer before and then, most unfortunately, tried to suck his fingers. 

He’d cried so loudly neighbors had come to investigate.

“Papa!” Aster squeaked.

“Keep you hands away from your face,” Lark told him. “Don’t move, I’m coming.”

“Try not to get stuck too, Lark.” Chamomile called with a poorly muffled laugh. “Again.”

*

He did, but only briefly, and now he kept a squirming Iris in his lap as Chamomile washed Aster’s face and arms up to his elbows in the sink. Aster’s blonde head could be seen over Chamomile’s shoulder, and not for the first time Lark marveled at the pale wheat shade of it. 

It confounded them both that he should be so brightly colored, when Iris’s own baby-dark hair had lightened to a red just a bit darker than Lark’s. 

His eyes were very much Lark’s, though, and he, like Iris, had Chamomile’s indomitable curls and full upper lip.

“I cannot think why you go anywhere near them after the last time,” Chamomile was chiding him.

“I wanted blueberries.” was the petulant reply.

“My daisy, we have perfectly good blueberries in the house.”

“Iris says the ones in the garden are better.”

Lark looked down at his daughter, who met his gaze with wide, guileless eyes.

“Must you torture your twin, so?” He asked her. She only grinned at him disarmingly. 

He sighed. It really was unlucky she was such a charming child. 

“What did Longfeather have to say?” He said, echoing similar words he’d said nearly four years ago.

Chamomile recalled them too, from the look he gave over his shoulder. He set Aster back on the ground. 

“Aster, be a dear and get the package, the one from Isagail Littlebird?”

Aster went, and came back with a paper-wrapped parcel in his arms, which he put on the table deliberately out of Iris’s grasping reach. They mutually poked their tongues at each other. Lark reached around them both and unknotted the twine around it.

Inside was an embroidered cloth stretched over a hoop. Framed by a braid of daisies, a little urn of flowers was depicted. Little tendrils of ivy descended to an iris flower, an aster bloom, and a…

“What is this last one?” Said Lark, touching the soft threads with a light finger.

He knew, though he asked. He’d become respectably knowledgeable in the language of flowers in the last years. 

Chamomile, his love, his motivation, wore a self-satisfied expression when he looked. His arms were crossed and his hands pinned to his sides. Or else, Lark knew, they would lay themselves over his stomach. 

“Guess,” Chamomile said.

Lark finally let Iris clamber down, and she and Aster both dashed away. 

“Well, I see gloxinia,” he said as he stood and slunk across the dividing space. “And ivy, and here is an iris, and an aster…”

Chamomile was pressed back into the counter now, pinned by Lark’s hips against his. His middle was plush and yielding, but it would grow out again.

He caught Chamomile’s chin. 

“Could it be a little chrysanthemum bud?” He said, so low that Chamomile shivered as he smiled.

“You guess correctly, my love.” He said, nuzzling close.

Lark abandoned the hoop to the counter, his hands full of cuddling husband. “I noticed there’s quite a bit of space left over.” He murmured. Chamomile peppered him with kisses as he spoke.

“I asked Isagail to do that,” Chamomile said. He narrowed his eyes, sly-faced as a fox. “I said I might have more work for her.”

“Did you,” Lark laughed. 

“It’s a big house.” Chamomile reasoned.

“So it is.” Said Lark, as Chamomile got an arm around his neck and pulled him down.

There was a crash from the further in the house, and small, loud voices raised in argument. 

Lark pressed him harder into the counter, tilted him back with the force of his kiss, and goosed him for good measure before pulling away.

“Luckily,” he added, and Chamomile, though a little starry-eyed, laughed.

“Shall we?” He said.

Lark took his hand, and picked up the hoop in the other. He admired the neat stitches of the iris, and the bright color of the aster. The little chrysanthemum was a promise, and gloxinia was the same shade as the one in Chamomile’s bouquet.

Chamomile had pressed those flowers to preserve them, and Lark had built a frame for them, the sides etched in the fashion of Chamomile’s wedding cuff. It hung over their bed in private display.

Chamomile laid his head on Lark’s shoulder, and Lark squeezed his hand. He was so full, so happy, he had no words to answer. He only nodded.


End file.
